About 7 percent of public housing units built in Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures for people whose homes were destroyed by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami were unoccupied as of late January, a Kyodo News survey showed Saturday.

A total of 909 units were vacant out of 13,933 apartments or houses provided by 46 municipalities in those three prefectures, and by the prefectural governments of Fukushima and Iwate.

The local governments eventually plan to offer 29,105 permanent housing units for rent based on requests from disaster victims. But because of construction delays and other reasons, many have since canceled their applications, finding places to live elsewhere or building their own homes, resulting in the vacancies.